Beer-and-Finger Mash, Bacon Yogurt, and More Kitchen Disasters

by Joshua David Stein

on 01/01/14 at 12:01 AM

Guest blogger Joshua David Stein continues his series of dispatches from the front lines of modern cooking with Wylie Dufresne of New York City's wd-50 and Alder. Stay tuned for more of our Modern Cooking Essentials series in the coming weeks.

"Some speak of the future. My love she speaks softly. She knows there's no success like failure. And that failure's no success at all" -- Bob Dylan, "Love Minus Zero"

As I move forward into the experimental gloaming of modernist cuisine, Sugar Magnolia playing in the background and Vitamix purring, the terrain will, no doubt, be perilous. There shall be goofs, gaffes, gels gone wrong, gelees gone wild. Even with plates as neat as lab reports and a kitchen so clean that NYC's professional dirt finders leave impressed, wd-50 chef Wylie Dufresne has been leveled by messy kitchen disasters.

"My disasters fall into two categories: There are dishes that didn't taste good and then there are things that we just weren't able to do. But every time you fail, you learn something for later," he says. Here are Wylies's biggest failures:

Hot Iced Cream

"We have long loved the idea of being welcomed at a restaurant on a really cold day with a scoop of ice cream that has the texture of cold ice cream but is actually warm. You can almost chew regular ice cream before it melts. How cool would it be if you could do that if it was warm? Unfortunately, we don't possess the knowledge to be able to make it yet. Along the way we've made hot soft serve, which is also interesting, but it wasn't our end goal. We're still on the hunt for hot iced cream."

Bacon Yogurt

"We all thought bacon-flavored yogurt sounded really interesting so we made it. Turns out, it was disgusting. You've probably had both foods at the same time but combining them just wasn't right. It was wrong, really wrong."

Chamomile Dashi

"We've made some broths that were horrible for reasons we still can't explain. One of them was a chamomile-flavored dashi. When we served it hot, it was disgusting. But it seemed like such a nice idea so we didn't get rid of it. After we let it cool, it tasted quite nice, actually."

"People thought it was terrible. I still think fondly of this dish but it didn't sell in the restaurant. There's a subset of failed dishes that we thought were great and the public voted otherwise. It wasn't that we couldn't execute them or even because we didn't think that the result was successful."

Beer-and-Finger Mash

"I've been to the hospital a lot. It's part of the game. When I worked at NYC's Jean-Georges, I lost a battle with an avocado that sent me to the hospital (it took too long so I worked the dinner service and went back later). At wd-50, we used to have these giant rolls of plastic wrap with metal teeth. We were at the end of service and when I reached for my beer on the other side of the roll, I accidentally sliced open my finger with the entire length of the teeth. I wrapped my finger in a napkin, grabbed my beer, and went to the hospital."